Storage Nation

Was a fun week last week – we’re onboarding so many fantastic people so fast, we’ve needed to develop a custom onboarding process.  Not enough time to do blog posts   Keith Coughlin, the vSpecialist leader for the Americas call is it the “Emersion” program.  The use of “Emersion” as opposed to “Immersion” is intentional As people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds, we are trying to cram them full of stuff and build a sense of camraderie.

Another fascinating example of convergence and synergy crossed my desk this morning.  The news release is fairly straightforward: " RSA Helps Global Corporations Collaborate Securely With New Release Of RSA® Data Loss Prevention Suite ".  As press releases go, it's sort of ordinary-looking material — what could possibly be exciting here? And that's exactly what I wanted to share with you ..

We've now moved beyond the vision and enabling technology discussion with private clouds.  We're seeing more and more IT organizations start to put adoption strategies in place. And, with large numbers usually comes inherent patterns . In this post, I'd like to talk about the three primary adoption models we're seeing, and some of the context that leads to their choices

Way back when, I thought it useful to do two courses of study.  I wanted that CS (computer science) degree, but the whole topic, while fascinating, seemed so self-contained. At the time, I thought adding coursework in economics was the right thing to do.  Even way back in the late 1970s (yes, I'm that old), I could see the two interweaving in very interesting ways.

I read with empathy recent posts on Wikibon regarding the general perception that storage management tools could be a whole lot better. One excellent post spoke of managing storage performance .  Another speaks to large warehousing workloads meandering through the fabric, and the havoc that caused.  Good reading. It'd be easy enough to say, " yes, darn it, we need better tools! ".  And plenty of storage admins would agree with me wholeheartedly. My argument, however, is that tools in isolation can only get you so far.  At some point, the model needs to change.  And that's a more difficult proposition

If you've made it this far, we've on an interesting journey together — exploring concepts around an internal "information utility" for our organizations. Yes, some pre-reading is required: an initial discussion here , concepts of efficiency here , building control models here , and — of course — how we might think about choice . In this post, we come full circle, and talk about how organizations might get from here to there. It's All About The Journey During 2009, I probably spoke with 200+ IT organizations around private cloud concepts.  Once they understood the concepts, they agreed — this was a fine destination to chart a course towards

You're midway through a sequence of posts describing the concept of building an "information utility" for the non-mission-critical information that's drowning every enterprise. I did my best to lay out an initial conceptual framework here .  Much of what I say here will make far more sense if you have the chance to read this first. In this post, I want to drill down on the enabling technologies and automated operational models that have the potential of dramatically transforming the efficiency of how we store, protect, manage and leverage our enterprise information

Today's plethora of EMC Iomega announcements at CES made me reflect on yet another subtle yet profound influence on the entire enterprise IT space — the impact of consumer technology. My wife (the psychology major!) tells me that we're hardwired to react to sudden shifts in our environment; we're not so adapted to recognizing and reacting to subtle shifts over longer periods. And if you're in the enterprise IT game, you may not be noticing just how much consumerization is changing how we think about enterprise IT. Consumerization Makes Everyone An IT Expert — Sort Of We all know how our personal technology works — our desktops and notebooks, our favorite applications and web sites, our high-speed internet, our smartphones.  Many of us have access to powerful tools at home, and we know how they work

I mentioned that we had found an issue in my vSphere 4 update 1 post (not the same one related to APD path state discussed here – please read that post – seems to be affecting a fair number of customers), and there’s now been enough research to validate the bug, so I want to explain it in more detail. So, here’s the story.  Our Cork Solutions Center team (an awesome crew!) was doing some testing with CLARiiON and vSphere 4 with Exchange 2007.   The Jetstress runs showed weird inconsistent results, that looked like this:   This is a Navisphere Analyzer (a CLARiiON performance tool) showing the IOps per front end interface at different user loads.   Note how all the front end ports are nicely loaded in the 20K, 16K, 12K, 8K, 4K user workloads, but then are all messy for the 24K user run?  What happened?   Well – the ESX host was rebooted between the 4K run and the 24K user run.

I mentioned that we had found an issue in my vSphere 4 update 1 post (not the same one related to APD path state discussed here – please read that post – seems to be affecting a fair number of customers), and there’s now been enough research to validate the bug, so I want to explain it in more detail. So, here’s the story.  Our Cork Solutions Center team (an awesome crew!) was doing some testing with CLARiiON and vSphere 4 with Exchange 2007.   The Jetstress runs showed weird inconsistent results, that looked like this:   This is a Navisphere Analyzer (a CLARiiON performance tool) showing the IOps per front end interface at different user loads.   Note how all the front end ports are nicely loaded in the 20K, 16K, 12K, 8K, 4K user workloads, but then are all messy for the 24K user run?  What happened?   Well – the ESX host was rebooted between the 4K run and the 24K user run. A bit more background – we try to do as much testing with both vSphere 4’s native multipathing (NMP) using round robin (RR) and also the EMC PowerPath/VE vSphere vmkernel loadable multipathing plugin (some customers will use both).   In the NMP RR tests, we switched the IO Operation Limit parameter to 1.   This parameter controls how many IOs are sent down a given path before vSphere starts to use the next path.   By default, this value is 1000